


Five Cups of Tea Q drank and One He Let Get Cold

by Diminua



Series: Five Times Q... [1]
Category: James Bond (Craig movies)
Genre: Gen, Kid Fic, M/M, Pre-Slash, Tea
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-30
Updated: 2014-10-01
Packaged: 2018-02-19 10:00:10
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 2,983
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2384174
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Diminua/pseuds/Diminua
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>This is gen at the moment, but is likely to move along as Q gets older.</p>
    </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is gen at the moment, but is likely to move along as Q gets older.

The bike chain is rank with old oil and lack of use, and the crate comes apart with the pained screech of nails that never expected to be torn out from their homes again, but the boy in the cheap jeans just wipes the muck and rust on the untucked end of his shirt and pushes his glasses back up his nose with the back of his hand before he realises he’s bleeding. He licks at it lavishly, puppyish, and tastes iron and salt and sting. 

The sound of the lawnmower, the familiar Sunday smells of turned earth and cut grass, the dull roar of the bypass, only contribute to the sense of normality, family and summer and no school for weeks and weeks. 

Everything he needs is laid out on the crazy paving, hammer and pliers and more nails and pram wheels. He likes to be methodical about these things.

‘What about brakes?’ Nan had asked. Missing the point as usual. ‘You’ve got a cobweb in your hair.’ 

Presumably it seemed important to her.

She’s got the hotpot on. He can smell it, a curl of scent out the top of the kitchen window where Dad has the extension flex snaked through for the lawnmower. His stomach growls. 

‘I don’t know where he puts it.’ Dad had said proudly, and he’d cringed a bit, because it’s that sort of phrase, like ‘haven’t you grown’ or ‘what do you want to be when you grow up?’ that is obviously meant to make him cringe. 

The lawnmower chugs and stops (next doors hover mower sings on though, and another starts up further down the road. People are just like lemmings sometimes). 

‘Not making tea are you?’ His Dad asks, red faced from bending down and trying to get the box with the clippings detached. 

‘I’m busy.’ Not too busy to get up and help with the machine though. The box comes off easily enough for him, tilt and slide, and Dad carries it to the compost to feed it in, letting him layer newspaper between each dusting of grass. 

Neither of them say, although they both know, that Nan will be out with tea in a minute anyway, now she’s heard the mower go off. Tea and the biscuit tin, since its Sunday, and they’ll all take ten minutes or so, Dad leaning on the coal bunker and Nan in the doorway to keep an eye on the oven, absent mindedly deadheading the hanging baskets with her free hand.

He sits himself back on the concrete while she does, cross legged, mug clinking solidly each time he sets it down, smearing with the grime that has marked him to the elbows. 

‘Look at you, you scruffy Herbert.’ Dad says affectionately, and takes a swipe at his hair that will only leave him even more untidy. He ducks away, almost falls backwards on his half built go-kart, but at least he doesn’t drop his tea.


	2. Chapter 2

‘You’re hilarious.’ He says grumpily, first leaning, then straightening up sharply in shock as the cot tilts beneath his weight. For a moment there is stunned silence as it bumps back onto all four legs; a few short, gasping, infuriated breaths, and then little lungs reinflate and the wailing resumes. 

Loathe to actually pick the squawking bundle up, he drapes one arm idly over and tugs the blanket down so he can wriggle his little finger into one tiny grasping fist. 

‘You’re not going to wake her up you know.’ He says conversationally.

He’s clearly wrong though because his mother stumbles through the door and blearily past him even as he speaks. 

‘Shouldn’t you be asleep?’ She says vaguely, squinting at the grey school trousers and colour change t shirt he’s wearing. 

‘I was asleep.’ He lies. ‘Screamer woke me.’ 

‘Push off back to bed then. She needs feeding.’ 

He’s halfway down the hall to his room before she changes her mind and calls after him. ‘Since you are up, fix us a cup of tea would you?’ 

Typical. He grumps downstairs and flicks the kettle on, white wall socket and the bigger black switch on the handle (he’s not quite sure why his mother insists on turning all the wall sockets off overnight, but has a vague idea that it’s to do with something that’ll never happen anyway, like a lightning strike.)  
He tells himself he resents the invasion of the nights. It used to be nice and quiet at 2 in the morning. His bedroom light the only one on, his computer and himself in silent conspiracy. 

Now there’s Screamer. 

‘Tea’s outside.’ He leaves it on top of the radiator and scuttles back to the safety of his own room before the two of them come out. Just contemplating the horror of breastfeeding is enough. He lives in dread of accidentally seeing it.


	3. Chapter 3

The hostel has bedbugs. They’ve decorated him in chain after chain of fat red dots over the forearms where muscle is starting to make an appearance and across the stomach that got skinnier and skinnier, along with his face, when he shot up like a dandelion less than a year ago. 

It’s also segregated by gender, which means he’s in a different prefab from the cousins he came with, and a mile’s walk down the motorway from the Leaning Tower. The price makes up for a lot though, and it’s only 2 nights before they move on. 

No kettle either, of course, so he’s boiling up a saucepan by the time the girls come round. Anna sleep-scruffy and Clem in full make up for the day. It doesn’t seem to make any difference to the attention the other lads in here give them, and he’s not sure it’s meant to. It’s just a reflex, like his own compulsion to fire his laptop up as soon as he wakes. 

There’s no signal here though, and no doubt it would cost a bomb if there was. He’ll have to hit an internet café later. 

‘You should drink coffee.’ Clem tells him as he puts three of the very weak Italian brand teabags in each cup and uses another to scoop up the boiling water and transfer it from the pan. He tops up with the full fat milk that seems to be on the turn already. (Is it unpasteurised or was the cold chain broken somewhere?) 

‘Well I want a cup.’ Anna has curled up on the sofa, exchanging chitchat about rugby with one of the big Australians who arrived the same night they did. He’s in shorts, a bit smug. Practically laying back in the other chair in his effort to make himself as inviting as possible. 

He doesn’t seem to have been bitten by bloody bedbugs either. How did he get away with that?

There’s no justice in the world.


	4. Chapter 4

'I’m not up to this.’ He doesn’t say it aloud until he’s by himself, out of M’s temporary office, past the desks and into the small and fairly vile lavatories. Luckily there’s no-one else in there at the moment, even though there are 200 people working just outside. Setting up desks, electronics, televisions (his job now, to oversee all this. He needs to get out there). 

He pulls a face at himself in the mirror with the peeling back (specks of brown in the silver, and empty space just over his right eyebrow where the old blue paint shows through.) Everything else is painted beige, but not underneath the mirror. They probably couldn’t take it down, screws rusted solid into the wall. 

He looks ill to himself, although that could be lighting, even if the sick sensation in his gut certainly isn’t. 

The thing is he wanted this. Really wanted it. Just not yet. Not until Q ( _You Are Q_ he reminds himself) was ready to retire. He’d had a place in Knockhill, not everyone’s favourite retirement destination, but he’d been planning to refurb classic cars. He loved tinkering, said something about an invisible motor bike. 

But that was meant to be in 4 years and they’d still expected to pull him in as a consultant, like the old boy before him. The one with the exploding pen obsession. Hardware men. Q (he must learn to think of himself as Q) supposes that’s the change M is seeking. She wants a software man – yesterday preferably.

You can learn a lot in 4 years. 4 years ago he was doing his PhD. In 4 years he could be ready for this.

He’s not ready now. Not really ready. M had known – had practically admitted it.

‘I know what you’re thinking.’ She’d said. (More than he’d known at the time, frankly) ‘But there is no time for it.’

And then Tanner had ushered him out, shaken his hand, given him that encouraging smile that didn’t quite work on his perpetually worried face, and the new Q had just continued walking, back down the metal staircase and past Eve Moneypenny and into the gents, all on autopilot. 

Not that he's really come out of autopilot since the explosion, the crash of concrete around him, the shock of finding himself still whole, still breathing, even his glasses intact. Although his shoulder still hurts from where the floor had rocked beneath him, pitching him down the stairs. He’s lucky he prefers the stairs, given what happened to the people trapped in the lifts.. 

He’s not going to think about the people in the lifts. Or the bodies of the dead he’d passed as he evacuated the building, the faces of the injured that were loaded into the ambulances, pale and set and wrong under slowly spinning blue lights. 

He swallows, ignores the bile he can taste. He can’t skulk in the gents all day. That’s a hopeless start to his new role. 

The little room they’ve given the computer intel team is, like everywhere else, chaos. The only organisation imposed by Chris Luke, (2 years older, same grade until 10 minutes ago, known him three years) who is having the room laid out like a lecture theatre for now. Space between each desk but not really enough. A raised floor they can put the servers under, perhaps. They’ll need ventilation but it’s better than any of the other options. These walls are too thick to drill through. 

Q moves towards the trestle he’s been using as a desk and finds a mug. 

It’s inoffensive, almost innocent. Perched jauntily on top of all the other debris that’s already accumulated. Black on off-white, with the flowing typeface of a scrabble tile.  


Q. It says. 

There’s a ribbon tied around the handle, and there is tea in the mug, still hot. Someone must have made it as soon as they saw him come out of M’s office. 

It’s a low key celebration, as befits the circumstances. Chris leads the team in a round of applause as Q sips cautiously, and then they get back to work.

Oh God, Q thinks, each word clear and distinct in a way that is surely abnormal. How the hell is he going to face these people when he cocks it up?


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Spoilers for Skyfall

It all happens so fast, as he knew it would. The thin veneer of professional cockiness cracking along with his systems. 

Underneath it though, there are processes that still function. Even while the ice cold trickle slides down his spine, spreads in a sickening pool through his stomach, Q removes the physical connections between MI6 and Silva’s laptop carefully. He’s swearing, he’s mortified, but he’s not ready to perpetrate mindless violence on a possibly useful machine or curl up and die in a corner just yet. 

‘Alright.’ He tells the still and silent people watching him, resisting looking through his glasses rather than over them, preferring the blur of expressionless faces. ‘I’m going to reset all systems to..’ He checks his watch, the only clock he can be certain isn’t tampered with. ’3.25 minutes ago.’ 

Ten seconds before the fatal error. If only actual time were so easy to reverse. 

His tea is still warm, the laptop still displaying the grinning, mocking skull, and 007 is in his ear, telling him Silva has escaped. It’s a relief actually, that Bond still thinks he can help, hasn’t written him off completely as an idiot, but he needs to let the reset go through before he can do anything useful, and he is working as fast as he can. 

Only once he’s sure they’re clean can he respond. 

‘I can hear you. I’m looking for you.’ He turns the map in three dimensions, all red lines, finds what he’s looking for, directs Bond to the tube and almost gets him knocked down by a train. 

That’s a nasty moment, but he seems to be developing a thicker skin already. This is almost agreeable. Maybe it’s Bond, bickering, matter of fact, and not particularly impressed when Q explains things he already worked out for himself. 

It's not news to Q that there are different sorts of intelligence. Bond seems remarkably - almost single-mindedly - clued in to other people’s motivations, and although it’s not until Q tries to force himself to think where Silva could be heading that Bond stops to consider the point, the moment he does he comes up with the only possible answer. 

‘He’s going for M. Call Tanner.’ 

They’ll never get her to leave. It would be ridiculous to expect it. But they can try.

Q is beginning to think his sense of time is distorted. He’s still on the same cup of tea – not as warm as it was but still not undrinkable – and still watching Bond’s tracker, moving faster now, following the curves of roads. Driving, obviously, but driving where? – when the man himself makes contact again. 

‘Q, I need help.' He says. 'I’ve got M. We’re about to disappear.’ 

‘What?’ Q swears he’s never had trouble keeping up with anything before today. Before the last 20 minutes, even. 

‘I need you to lay a trail of breadcrumbs impossible for anyone to follow except Silva. Think you can do it?’

Q glances round, checks no-one’s listening in; no-one to tell tales, no-one to be implicated when he agrees. Lowers his voice and leans a little closer to the teleconference hub. 

‘I’m guessing this isn’t strictly official.’ 

‘Not even remotely.’ 

‘So much for my promising career in espionage.’ If nothing else, at least that remark will amuse the agent. 

The last of the tea is barely warm, but he downs it anyway.


	6. Chapter 6

Q is cross legged on the floor, sorting a box of bullet cartridges the cleaners found in a cupboard down here. It’s one of the smaller rooms being requisitioned for telecommunications, and there’s a yellow oblong outlined and cross hatched on one wall where they intend to cut through to the main hub. Otherwise it’s just filing cabinets and musty old paper and left over bullets. Someone took care of them once upon a time though, they’re greased and wrapped in what feels like silk. He’s wondering if it would be worth testing a few. 

Intent on what he's doing, he's not really aware of the two visitors until one of them speaks.

‘Q?’ 

‘007. Moneypenny.’ 

‘There’s a cobweb in your hair.’ Moneypenny tells him. ‘But I love your new office.’

‘Very amusing. Don’t blame me if coming in here makes you sneeze.’ Q stands and moves his mug to the top of a filing cabinet before he pats down his trousers, displacing small clouds of dust back on to the floor. ‘And I often have cobwebs in my hair. It’s nothing to worry about.’ 

Eve isn't really here for him though. Only seems to have come down to deliver Bond, or perhaps on the way somewhere else, and they exchange guarded and not quite insincere goodbye smiles before she turns to leave. Q supposes it’s a tricky relationship, shooting and then very nearly shagging someone for Queen and country. 

‘She’s right though.’ Bond says. ‘Hold still.’ And he takes two steps into the room to brush the cobweb away with his fingers, scrapes it off them on the edge of a cabinet handle. Q stands perfectly still, keeping his face as straight as humanly possible, trying to process the fact that James Bond has his hand in Q’s hair and Q, apparently, rather likes it. 

Oh dear. 

Reboot, he thinks. Change tracks, and keep moving. So he steps back and tucks his box of ammunition under the left arm and picks his mug up with his right hand. Keeps his tone clipped. ‘I assume you’re here for your equipment, yes? Come on then.’ 

Bond doesn’t say anything, but he falls into step behind him for the short walk back to the armoury, listens to the quick run down about what he’s been given and the usual request that he bring it back in one piece. ‘..and as ever.’ Q finishes up. ‘Good luck.’

Bond nods, which is a sort of thank you, but his mind is clearly on something else, brow slightly furrowed. 

‘You’re not as young as you look are you?’ He says at last. 

‘Alright. I’ll bite. How young do I look?’ 

‘Too young.’

‘Is this about my complexion again?’ But he doesn’t think it is. There’s something.. pensive in Bond’s eyes, even as his lips twitch in acknowledgement of humour. 

‘What do you like to drink?’ Bond asks. ‘Besides tea.’ 

‘Dry cider, sometimes. Red wine.’ 

‘French or Italian?’ 

‘French.’ Actually mostly New Zealand, but this doesn’t seem the moment to introduce Bond to the idea that good wine can be made south of the equator. 

‘I’ll bring you a bottle.’ 

‘Thank you.’ Q says simply, but his internal monologue is.. speechless, actually. ‘That would be lovely.’ 

Bond nods again, a leave taking this time. 

Oh. Q thinks. That was odd. 

And now his bloody tea is cold as well.


End file.
